Humberto Salazar Ibarguen, researcher at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico, received the medal of Science and Technology "Luis Rivera Terrazas" in recognition of his contributions in the field of Natural Sciences.

The planned upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory, AugerPrime, is featured as the cover story in the June 2016 issue of the CERN Courier, an international journal of high-energy physics whose readership spans the globe. The article, titled “AugerPrime looks to the highest energies”, explains the scientific motivation for the detector upgrades and presents some of the improvements foreseen to enhance the experiment’s performance. AugerPrime is expected to be completed in 2018 with little interruption to current data-taking operations.

One of the biggest challenges in cosmic-ray physics is to accurately pin down the absolute energy of a measured cosmic ray. This is traditionally done with an array of particle detectors deployed on a large grid, which then sample the energetic "air-shower" particles made in atmospheric interactions of the original cosmic particle. This is a tough challenge for particle detectors because the complex interaction physics at the highest energies has to be extrapolated from measurements at collider experiments, which operate at significantly lower energies - even at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). To accurately set the absolute energy scale, scientists using the Pierre Auger Observatory thus rely on combining the particle detectors (for Auger, water tanks used to measure the Cherenkov light flash made in the water by relativistic charged particles) with the nitrogen fluorescence detection technique. This works very well, but requires tremendous effort, in particular to control the effects of scattering and absorption in the ever-changing atmosphere. Now, we have shown that radio detection of extensive air showers can be a very powerful means to cross-calibrate the absolute energy scale of different experiments.